Cellphone-Enabled Healthcare

The Brilliant Idea: A cellphone microscope that can diagnose disease cheaply and effectively anywhere in the world.

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By Logan Ward and the Editors of Popular Mechanics

Oct 4, 2010

Photograph by Ofer Wolberger

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Innovator: Aydogan Ozcan, University of California, Los Angeles

Aydogan Ozcan hopes to make microscope lenses obsolete. "Microscopes are analog technology," says the 31-year-old electrical engineer. Bulky and expensive, they rely on finely polished curved glass to refract and focus light. By hacking a cellphone's software to perform the same function, Ozcan has brought an invention with Renaissance-era origins into the 21st century.

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Ozcan's cellphone microscope focuses LED light on a slide positioned over the camera's image sensor. The sensor converts light bouncing off and around a sample of, say, blood cells into electrons and records them as a digital hologram. Image-processing software analyzes the hologram once it's uploaded to a computer. One application, which will be field-tested in Brazil this year, identifies red blood cells misshaped by the malaria parasite—the same thing a technician searches for using a standard microscope. Unlike a scan by a trained human eye, however, software analysis is instantaneous. Future apps could screen for disease-causing parasites in drinking water and help monitor the health of HIV patients by counting T-cell levels in their blood.

"The key to everything is the cellphone," Ozcan says. In 1990, fewer than 12.5 million people worldwide had them; today, 4.6 billion do. While conventional lens-based microscopy has essentially plateaued, fierce competition causes cellphone-camera technology to advance rapidly even as prices plummet. Eventually, Ozcan believes, point-of-care facilities in the U.S. will begin replacing expensive and time-consuming lab procedures with cellphone-based diagnostic tools. "Once insurance companies start to accept this," he says, "we will have better, more affordable healthcare and better quality of life."